Oo, lack of tact. What a crime. On the one side you have a group of vicious rabid animals who take it upon themselves to post vile epithets, threats, and enact real-world revenge, and on the other side is someone who, as part of the victimized group, failed to use tact. The time for tact is long over.
In a way I feel sorry for them, because they are stuck in this position where they feel boxed into a rapidly shrinking corner by the combination of patriarchy and feminism. Not that they realize it—they just blame feminism for “destroying” their lives—but that’s the problem.
Patriarchy has always told them that in order to be men, they must NOT be anything that a woman is. Anything that stereotypical gender roles conventionally assign to women is “girly” and “unmanly” and they must avoid it.
And in order to be men, they must also be able to do “manly” stuff better than women can. Any time “a girl kicks your ass” at any activity that is stereotypically gendered male, that undermines your masculinity.
So then along comes feminism and starts telling women that they can be and do whatever they want to, whether it’s stereotypically “manly” or “womanly”. And many women become lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs and scientists and politicians and so on, so from the sexist male’s point of view all those activities are now “feminized” or “emasculated”. These damn feminists are contaminating all spheres of life with their girl cooties, so taking part in them no longer validates a man’s masculinity.
But there were still a few life environments that sexist men could tell themselves were still intrinsically “manly” because women weren’t much involved in them. Such as the genres of video games that concentrate on explosions and tits.
And then things started changing. Some women wanted to play explosions-and-tits video games too, without being harassed just for being women. Some women wanted to make or distribute types of video games that weren’t about explosions and tits. Some women even had the temerity to start saying that there are some things about explosions-and-tits video games that are objectionable or offensive.
As a result, many sexist men started feeling seriously backed into a corner. The women have already tainted almost the whole world of work and society and relationships with their poisonous unmanly vagina slime, and now they’re even invading the last manly oasis, the explosions-and-tits video games. That’s what the USU terrorist was talking about when he said
Oh, and I wrote that last post before I saw this recent comment quoted at We Hunted the Mammoth:
I couldn’t make this stuff up.
And he’s Da Nice Guy
Frankly, anyone willing to threaten violence over this issue should be beaten with steel rods until quadriplegic.
Wow. This whole topic is just so complex and vile and rife with humanity and all of its failings. I couldn’t begin to do justice to the important and salient points. The heinous stuff is truly heinous. The disgusting stuff is truly disgusting.
And almost no one is handling this topic in a way that I find admirable. Even the people who are clearly righteous and on the right side are brandishing their righteousness in a way that diminishes them (I know this is the Pit, where that is how things are done, but there’s an irony here that I know many see, but few can articulate - and I’m not one of those few, sadly).
So let me just say a small thing, please. It’s not the most important. It’s not the most righteous. It’s just a small thing I want to say amidst the maelstrom of terribly great and malevolent horribleness. Please.
I saw the boogie2988 video linked above, and it struck a chord with me. There are undoubtedly a number of people like him, who identify as gamers, who agree with or even have fought for equality and equanimity who have been caught up in this whole mess, been blindsided by it. Their first introduction into feminism has been, unfortunately, from the harshest aspects - the vehement blowback - rather than from anything involving understanding or inclusiveness. My poor estimation is that a large minority of “gamergaters” probably fits, more or less, into this category - where their introduction to feminism (thank to how it is presented to them) is an attack on something they identify with.
I wish I could find a voice in all of this that could raise the awareness of these people (people who are very much like me, and like you, except lacking some years of experience and some education on the history of human rights struggles), instead of driving them further into the dark side of embattled ignorance.
MLK had a dream that his children would join hands with all children. My dream is more humble. Is there not a voice out there who can speak to those who are merely lost without hating them for being lost?
It’s a small thing. I don’t expect that what I’m asking for would have any impact on the horribly evil people who are planning death on women for speaking out. But I have to believe that what I’m asking for would have an impact on a large number of people who are simply ignorant and are misguidedly trying to do the right thing. I have to believe that.
ETA: I passed this by my wife (Masters in Psych, undergrad minor in Woman’s Studies), and she said to me: “You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms. The most convenient definitions.” She had googled The Breakfast Club. How can it be that a 30-year-old movie has something poignant to say about the current situation? Because it is the same thing, over and over again. I have to believe that.
This is called tone policing. People are being driven from their homes by terrorists and you want us to feel sorry for the morons who wandered into the #gamergate mess and lent their support without noticing that they’d stumbled into a Klan meeting.
Unless they immediately made their apologies and promised to limit their future internetting to Club Penguin - then they can spare me their god damn whining about how “oh, I never realized feminists are so angry.”
Frankly, we feminists are so used to this shit that we are not nearly angry enough.
Oh - and the MLK reference? Vomitous.
What I said is not “called tone policiing”, period. Please free yourself from jargon enough to comprehend what it is that I’ve said.
“We feminists” have a long way to go, and we are not all in agreement as to how to approach those who don’t count themselves amongst us.
I read Orr’s post, below, and Merneith’s response, and my post is obviously going to get the same kind of “we have a right to be angry, aggressive and insulting, because the other side has done far worse” kind of reply, but I am going to post it anyway.
This article is no way to help solve the problems in the gaming community. It uses the moral high ground to inflame the situation. As despicable as death threats? No, not even close. Something I want to distance myself from? Absolutely.
There is apparently no middle ground, or third party position in this discussion. That’s a problem.
This may be totally irrelevant, and boring to boot, but I asked a couple of rabid gamer boys today what their reactions to Gamergate was. Neither one had even the slightest idea what i was talking about. After a cursory explanation (I really didn’t want to taint perceptions at all) one of the guys started making excuses for the environment of he man’s no girls allowed feeling of gaming as a whole, and the other said “that’s fucked up - what the fuck is that?”
Just a datapoint, irrelevant in the larger discussion.
You talk about how those on the side of righteousness are not expressing themselves in a way you find admirable. That sounds like tone-policing to me.
I *totally *get what you’re saying, but do you have to say it like such a shrieking harpy?
If you totally get what I’m saying, then why in the world would you ask such a loaded question?
Giving you the benefit of the doubt (which, unlike most Pit denizens, I actually really want to do), did I actually sound like a “shrinking harpy”?
Dude, this is on you. You, and you alone, can turn the tide. Right here, right now.
Am I a “shrieking harpy”, or am I a poor schlob, with his heart in the right place, trying to do the right thing?
And, hey, I get that I get a little to involved in my writing - I expect too much from myself. Give me a break for being human.
Is everything I said really reducible to being nothing but a “shrieking harpy?” Or did I, in a human way, actually touch upon something better than mere bullshit?
Emphasis added. This is the part of your remarks that simply makes no sense, AFAICT.
Who on earth can these people be who allegedly “agree with or even have fought for equality and equanimity” but somehow managed to reach adulthood or at least late adolescence without having the slightest notion of what feminism is?
That’s just absurd. Feminism isn’t some obscure fringe sect like the Swedenborgians or Maitreya Theosophy that the average person would be completely unaware of, and thus vulnerable to forming biased judgements about the whole group from encountering a few abrasive representatives of it. Feminism, on the contrary, was a major 20th-century movement that changed laws and lives throughout American culture and still permeates the culture today.
I find it simply ludicrous to suggest that any functioning adult over 35, or one under 35 who has even the faintest acquaintance with recent American history, would really never have experienced “their introduction to feminism” until Gamergate came along. Can even the gamer stereotype really produce examples of that level of clueless cave-dwelling reality-detached incompetence at interacting with the world above ground?
Pssst: although I can’t speak for raventhief, it seemed pretty clear to me that his rhetorical question was not actually calling you a “shrieking harpy”, but rather just showing you another example of “tone policing”.
Tone policing is a way of derailing an argument by deflecting the focus from what somebody is saying to a critique of the way they’re saying it. It’s not generally considered supportive behavior.
“I understand that what they did was wrong, but yelling and cursing about it makes you no better than they are.”
“You’re just damaging your cause by getting angry.”
“Maybe if you calmed down and said what you had to say in a less hostile manner, I’d be more inclined to listen.”
“I totally get what you’re saying, but do you have to say it like such a shrieking harpy?”
“Even the people who are clearly righteous and on the right side are brandishing their righteousness in a way that diminishes them.”
“Is there not a voice out there who can speak to those who are merely lost without hating them for being lost?”
It’s all a way of saying “The fact that you’re expressing anger gives me an excuse to dismiss or ignore the problem you’re angry about, so that’s what I’ll do.”
What you said was stupid but it explains why you’re complaining that we ought to be nicer to useful idiots who don’t even notice that they’re supporting terrorist behavior.
Oh, piss off. Go bake cookies for terrorist sympathizers if you think the problem is that we just haven’t been nice enough to people who are talking about drinking the blood from our genitals.
I must admit that I’m rather out of my depth here. If you took my comment this way, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I am not at all interested in trying to defend indefensible crap. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who would be receptive to your message if you did not alienate them so horribly.
Of course, I reiterate, that is a very small part of this whole thing. Some of the most inveterate assholes are far beyond trying to redeem in such a way, and they certainly deserve more vehemence that this.
And yet…
Kimstu, I greatly appreciate what you are trying to do here, I really do. I just wish that you could appreciate what I was trying to do.
But I said what I have to say. I’m sure that the few people still reading this thread who have any equanimity left have understood what I’ve said.
I know what it is you want, and I support it. I just think that we need to go about it in a different way. You seem to feel the need to make me some sort of enemy. My need is that I would like to see someone wiser and more informed than both of us take the helm, and shift this movement beyond hate, towards greater understanding.
This is the “tone policing” people have been talking about. The chief problem with it is that it comes across as so absurdly unbalanced.
I mean, really? One group of people is saying “Video games and gamer culture are often misogynist and oppressive towards women, and there should be more active criticism of the toxic resentment and harassment that they manifest”, and another group of people is saying “YOU UGLY FUCKBITCH FEMINIST CUNT I’M GONNA RIP OFF YOUR LABIA AND MAKE YOUR CHILDREN EAT THEM AND YOU ARE A FILTHY DISGUSTING WHORE WHO DESERVES TO DROWN IN PISS”…
… and you’re worrying about “hundreds, if not thousands, of people” being “so horribly alienated” by the FIRST group?
Dude, do you have any awareness of how fucked up that sounds? Normal civilized human beings do not calmly tsk-tsk about death threats and doxxing and hate-filled obscene abuse while they whine about the targets of the threats and abuse being too “alienating” and “harsh” and “uninclusive”.
These people that you’re bizarrely pleading with feminists to be nicer to, because somehow they are good people who just happen to get more deeply upset over feminists’ perceived lack of niceness than over anti-feminists’ literally terroristic rage, simply DO NOT EXIST.
There aren’t hundreds or thousands of decent guys who are being “horribly alienated” by anti-sexist condemnation from feminists while they take anti-feminist obscene threats and vilification in their stride. Just like there aren’t “a number” of well-intentioned, egalitarian-minded gamers who never knew anything about feminism until they suddenly encountered some feminists who were pissed off about Gamergate.
You’re asking us to believe in unicorn horns and dragon eggs, and then you act surprised and hurt when we make fun of your suggestions.
It reminds me of some of the conservative reaction to stuff like the Fergueson protests — indeed, public protests in general, usually liberal/leftist in objective.